Gerson Therapy

The following text is an excerpt from the excellent book “Cancer Step Out of the Box” by Ty Bollinger. Reproduced here, with his kind permission.

Gerson Therapy is a metabolic therapy which uses a special diet, along with supplements, and coffee enemas. The first two editions of this book did not contain details on this cancer treatment, but due to additional research over the past couple of years, I now believe that the Gerson Therapy is one of the best cancer treatments available. It is undoubtedly the most basic, the best recognized, the most complete, and the longest existing effective cancer treatment available today. It is also very rigorous and requires that patients adhere to a very strict protocol in order to succeed.

Vince Says
“This was one of the first alternative cancer therapies I heard about, and to me it just simply made sense. Good stuff in with juiced organic fruits and vegetables, and get the bad stuff out with coffee enemas. How simple is that? And if you do your research properly, you will see that it does work.”

Dr. Max Gerson was a German refugee physician who came to New York and preached a gospel of pure organic food and farming. Prior to immigrating to the USA, while he was a resident physician in Germany, Gerson was able to cure his own migraine headaches through changing his diet. The foods that Gerson was sensitive to included many of the staples of young German medical students (creamy fish dishes, spicy sausages, alcohol, salt, and fatty meats). Later, when he entered private practice, he began prescribing his migraine diet to his own patients and reported great success.

One migraine patient reported that his lupus vulgaris (skin tuberculosis) had also cleared up on Gerson’s migraine diet. Gerson began to use his dietary approach to cure other lupus sufferers. He even began to have success with treating tuberculosis. A prominent pulmonary surgeon, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, heard about Gerson’s successes and invited him to conduct a clinical trial of his therapy at Sauerbruch’s Munich tuberculosis ward.

Gerson’s dietary regime was applied to 450 tuberculosis patients. At that time, tuberculosis was considered to be “incurable.” After the trial, it was reported that 446 patients completely recovered. For those of you who like percentages, that’s a 99.1% cure rate on terminal patients!

Gerson’s dietary therapy quickly became well-known in Europe, and it was adopted by many as standard treatment for immune system disorders of all kinds, including tuberculosis. Advocates of the therapy claim many Swiss mountain tuberculosis sanatoria were put out of business by Gerson’s discoveries and are now ski resorts, including Davos, Gstaad and others.

In 1928, Gerson received a call from a woman who was told she had incurable bile-duct cancer. According to Gerson, she begged him to treat her with his migraine and tuberculosis therapy, accepting that he knew nothing about cancer and could not predict the outcome of his treatment. Gerson claimed she totally recovered on his therapy, as did two friends of hers who had cancer. Of course, with any successful cancer treatment, there will be “hit men” from the Medical Mafia that attempt to slander and criticize the provider, and Gerson was no exception.

He embarked on a clinical trial of his therapy that would attempt to silence his critics once and for all. He decided to treat only patients who had been declared “terminal” in writing by at least two specialists, so there was no doubt as to the disease or its prognosis. On April 1, 1933, just six weeks before he was to present the results of his study, Adolf Hitler began arresting Jews and sending them to concentration camps. Gerson literally escaped arrest by accident, and left Germany for good, leaving behind the results of his study.

As a German Jew, Gerson was forced to flee Germany with his family in 1933, first to Vienna and then to Ville d’Avray (near Paris) and London. He settled in New York City in 1936. Once in the USA, Gerson began applying his dietary therapy to advanced cancer patients. In 1946, along with five of his cured cancer patients, he testified in court that he had discovered a cure for cancer. On the evening of July 3, 1946, it was announced publicly on radio that Gerson had discovered a cure for cancer. Not surprisingly, this public declaration was condemned by his “holier-than-thou” colleagues in the New York State Medical Society.”

After several more years of successful medical practice, but under increased scrutiny, Dr. Max Gerson died suddenly on March 8, 1959, under mysterious circumstances. Charlotte Gerson, his youngest daughter and founder of the Gerson Institute, stated: “My father, aged 78, was in perfectly good health when, from one day to the next, he felt awful. They tested his blood and found a high level of arsenic.” When asked if she had called the police, she replied: “No, we had our suspicions but knew from experience that justice would not be done.

According to Dr. Gerson, cancer is the result of two things: deficiency and toxicity . Our body simply doesn’t get enough nutrition on the modern diet and is exposed to too many chemicals and toxins and as a result develops cancer. Gerson believed that cancer could be reversed if the patient would cleanse the body from these toxins and restore the immune system with proper nutrition.

As a result of this belief, the underlying foundation of Gerson Therapy is detoxification and rejuvenation of the body, based upon the principle of flooding the body with micronutrients from salt-free, fat-free, organic, vegetarian food, including 13 fresh-pressed fruit and vegetable juices daily. This treatment utilizes a “whole body” approach, unlike toxic conventional treatments, since Gerson did not believe that treating only the localized area of concentrated cancer cells was a good idea.

Pancreatic enzymes are vitally important to the Gerson Therapy. Here’s why: Before the body can deteriorate into cancer, all the body’s defense systems have to be depressed and out of balance. If your pancreas is working properly and if you have adequate pancreatic enzymes, you cannot develop cancer. As I mentioned in the chapter on nutrition, pancreatic enzymes (specifically trypsin and chymotrypsin) dissolve the protective protein coating which covers malignant tissue and makes it impossible for the body’s natural immune system to recognize the cancer cells as foreign. So, in a body with cancer, pancreatic enzymes must be supplemented.”

Correlated to its adherence to pancreatic enzymes, Gerson Therapy also holds tightly to the axiom that excess protein in the diet is carcinogenic. As a former competitive bodybuilder, I used to follow the advice of doctors and nutritionists and consume massive amounts of animal protein on a daily basis. For instance, I would typically have eight small meals of at least thirty grams of protein, comprised primarily of chicken, fish, and eggs. I mistakenly believed that meat, fish, eggs, and milk products had complete proteins (containing the eight essential amino acids not produced in the body), while all vegetable proteins were incomplete proteins.

However, research at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Max Plank Institute in Germany has shown that most vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, and grains are excellent sources of complete proteins. In fact, their proteins are easier to assimilate than those of meat, and they are non-toxic. Whereas the Karolinska researchers also discovered that when meat was heated to 212° (regardless of whether it was boiled, broiled, fried, or baked) the protein in the meat changed into toxic, cancer-causing amides. Research done at the University of California at Irvine showed that children who eat as few as three hotdogs a week were 10 to 12 times as likely to develop leukemia and brain tumors. In a vast study conducted in China by T. Colin Campbell, PhD., it was found that the groups of people who ate the most animal protein had, by far, the most heart disease and cancer.

One of the reasons to avoid excess protein is that the body stores very little protein. Our kidneys and liver are responsible for getting rid of the protein; so the more protein we eat, the harder the kidneys and liver must work to excrete it. Gerson was also very interested in treating the liver, since he believed that the liver was actually the most important organ in the body due to the fact that it is the filtration system for detoxification. As a matter of fact, he saw a parallel between the deterioration of the liver and the growth and progression of the cancer!

Due to his concern for liver problems, he was opposed to fasting and instead, his regimen called for fresh pressed juice every waking hour of the day. By drinking the juice, patients receive an enormous flooding of nutrients, minerals, enzymes, and vitamins which start to flush out the kidneys. The nutrients go into the tissues, into the cells and force out the poisons, and all those poisons are released into the blood stream. The liver filters them out. You have to help the liver get rid of them, and there is only one way to do this – by opening the bile ducts. Gerson accomplished this task with his much maligned and ridiculed coffee enemas. Even today, half a century after his death, he remains a favorite “whipping boy” of the Cancer Industry.

Until recently, I was unaware of the fact that sodium stimulates tumor growth. Also, it’s a fact that all processed foods contain reduced potassium and increased sodium. So, with the Gerson Therapy’s focus on high potassium and low sodium (in the same ratio which can be found in fresh live foods), it’s no wonder that all processed foods are forbidden. With the Gerson Therapy, most fats are strictly prohibited since they stimulate tumor growth. However, Gerson was aware that cancer patients do need a certain amount of essential fatty acids. He became aware of the work of Dr. Johanna Budwig in Germany who showed that flaxseed oil, which helps to stimulate the immune system, is well tolerated by cancer patients. As a general rule, with the exception of coconut oil, you should never cook with oils, since their chemical nature changes (deteriorates), acrylamides are formed, and they cause health problems. So the flaxseed oil must only be used raw and cold.

The Gerson Institute was established in 1977 in San Diego by Charlotte Gerson, solely for the purpose of educating the public and cancer patients about the Gerson Therapy. Is it any surprise that the corrupt United States government does not support the Gerson Therapy? As a matter of fact, it is illegal in the USA to treat and cure patients with the Gerson Therapy. In response, Charlotte opened a hospital in Tijuana, Mexico. You can visit the Gerson Institute’s website ( www.Gerson.org ) for more information on Gerson Therapy.

An excellent book on the Gerson Therapy was written by Max Gerson himself and is entitled A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases and the Cure of Advanced Cancer . It’s available on Amazon.